Tunnel your connection with Putty and Firefox
You might be trying to bypass a firewall block to some of your favorite websites: MySpace, Facebook etc. Or attempting to make your connection more secure on a public network. This type of connection encrypts your data in a secure socket layer and hides your browsing.
Requirements:
Hosting Account with SSH access.
SSH client. We will be using Putty.
Firefox Web Browser.
First you will need to have access to an SSH connection to your hosting account. Most web hosts should be able to provide you with one. If you need a web host I have a short list of my favorites on the Webhosts page. The only two that I have verified for ssh access are Hostgator and Bluehost. They both require that you provide them with photo id via email or fax and it has to match the account information on file. This is because providing you with SSH access is looked at as something more dangerous. It's like giving someone Administrator rights on your computer. You would want to know that they really are who they say they are. Wouldn't you ?
Once you have your ssh username, password and server IP address (You should obtain all of this info from your hosting company) you will need to set up "the tunnel" you can think of this as a real tunnel that will connect your computer to a second computer through which all information will be flowing. Essentially what you are doing is browsing the same content from a different location. Since Most people are on Windows machines I will be primarily focusing on how to set this up on a Windows box.
In order to set up the tunnel you will need an SSH client. A very good an popular one for Windows machines is Putty. Since Putty is such a light application you don't even need to run any installation wizard just double click it and it will start right up. Make sure you have Session selected in the list on the left side then fill in the Host Name (or IP address) field with this: username@000.000.000.000 Of course replace the word username with your username and 000.000.000.000 with the actual IP. Next lets give this connection a name an save it. Type something like SSH tunnel under Saved Sessions and click Save. We are half way there. We have set up how and what we want it to connect to. Next we need to set up the tunneling. For this expand the SSH option in the list on the left side and then click on Tunnels. In here type 9999 in the Source Port box then check the Auto and Dynamic options and click Add. We want to save these changes so go back to the Sessions option and click on Save, again. All done here. Lets connect! Double click on the saved connection and it should pull up a command like looking prompt and ask you to authenticate with your SSH password. Type that in and press enter. (The password will not show up at all. Not even stars. This is for extra security.) You are now connected. You can minimize that window but do not close it because it is keeping your tunnel open.
Next you will have to tell Firefox to access all web content from that remote IP address though the tunnel. Before we do that lets run a little test to see what your current IP address is. You will need to browse to IpChicken and take note of your current IP address. After you have done that go to: Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Network (Tab) > Settings... > Select Manual proxy configuration For SOCKS Host type in localhost for Port use 9999 that is the port we configured putty to forward information through earlier remember ? 
Now visit IpChicken again and the IP address reported should be that of your hosting server.
PS: If you are on Linux and have ssh access all you need to do is run: "ssh -D 9999 username@000.000.000.000" from your shell session (Leave the window up).
Congrats you did it you can now browse from your hosting server however remember this does not mean you are untraceable. Your hosting company has all of your information on file and they can tell what IP address you are connecting to the ssh tunnel from. Another note to make is that you will not be able to browse anything at all if you close out of your putty connection. This is because you have configured Firefox to use that proxy connection. If you want to stop using the tunnel for browsing and revert to browsing from your own IP you will have to edit the setting in Firefox to the default: Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Network (Tab) > Settings... > Select No proxy.
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